Ole Blog

Cinco de Mayo is so ingrained in American culture that we often don’t give the holiday a second thought beyond ordering a heaping bowl of chips and salsa (with extra guacamole on the side, please), and a frosty glass of margaritas on the rocks. But in fact, Cinco de Mayo is so much more...

It’s 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, and the back room of Ole Mexican Grill is filled to the brim with raw ingredients. Vegetables have been slow roasted all day for salsa, and bowls of spices litter the counter spaces. Meat is lined up on a tray, ready to be sliced. It looks like we’re either on the set of a cooking show or getting ready for a very large party.

But no, we’re just getting ready for a marketing meeting with Erwin Ramos. Needless to say, he went above and beyond what we expected for a “beyond the dish” interview. But if he’s game for this big of a production, so am I- so we strapped a GoPro to his forehead and had him get to work showing us the stories behind three very popular dishes at Ole...

What do you think of when you hear “farm-to-table”? Farmers markets? Locally sourced meat? Expensive? All of these things can be true. But there are a lot of sides to the farm-to-table movement, and some of them might surprise you.

This just in: the chupacabra taco has landed at Ole.

This delightful little package of surprisingly savory, succulent, subtly spicy chupacabra meat topped with onions and cilantro for both garnish and flavor will take your taste buds on a journey through Mexico and leave you howling for more...

Google “Chef Erwin Ramos”. Go ahead, do it. You’ll find a few mentions of his background, many mentions of Ole, and his name listed as a special guest lecturer and chef for classes and events.

That’s all wonderful and gives him an excellent pedigree as a chef. But to get the real Erwin, I headed over to Ole before opening and dug the illustrious chef out of the bowels of his restaurant (no, seriously- I had to find him in the basement, where he was coordinating catering jobs for the day) for an interview. Here are a few stories that I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard...